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Sci-Fi Space Idle

Aliens Are Likely To Look and Behave Like Us 5

It's the tripnaut! writes "The Daily Telegraph has posted an article stating that 'Professor Simon Conway Morris at Cambridge University will tell a conference on alien life that extraterrestrials will most likely have evolved just like earthlings and so resemble us to a degree with heads, limbs and bodies. They also add a cautionary note that 'Unfortunately they will have also evolved our foibles and faults which could make them dangerous if they ever did visit us on Earth."

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Aliens Are Likely To Look and Behave Like Us

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  • I'll tell you what. If I was part of an advanced alien culture/race, (more evolved than us, etc), and looked carefully at our Earth, and what is going on these days and how things are ran.... I'd pass up this crazy-house without any hesitation.
  • Hard to beleive. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jte ( 707188 )
    That's hard to believe, given the diversity just on this planet.
  • ... than either the summary or the original article presents them. To be fair, they're not ideas that boil down easily into a soundbite suitable for a fast-working journalist.
    Brief background : Conway-Morris was one of the PhD students who worked on the famous re-examination and re-interpretation of the Burgess Shale fauna. It seems that he took some umbrage at being attributed (obliquely) the line "Oh fuck, another new phylum!" by Steven Jay Gould in his "Wonderful Life" book of 1987 (IIRC). He also has mo

  • So what he's saying is that aliens will be complete flipping assholes too? I sincerely hope any species sophisticated enough to cross the vast reaches of space and visit us would be several orders of magnitude more enlightened then the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Keith Olbermann, and virtually every commentator on Fox News!
  • In TNG, there was that one episode (1st Season) where life had evolved between two layers of soil (obviously not space travelers). Plus other random non-humanoid life forms that were scattered throughout the series (the insect race comes to mind, the Changelings in DS9).

    In Cosmos, the great late Carl Sagan mentions extra-terrestrial life, and the many, many possibilities of intelligent life. I think to say "the most likely way that intelligent life capable of interstellar travel will evolve will be bipeda

"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."

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